Ferrari: Under The Skin

Last year I was asked by Marina Willer from Pentagram to shoot a poster for the Ferrari Exhibition: "Under the Skin" at the Design Museum. I've worked with Marina on a number of interesting projects over the years so jumped at the chance. The car chosen was the iconic Ferrari F40, a "racing car built for the road", and the team at Pentagram managed to track down an immaculate example. Ideally we would have shot this in a car studio, but due to deadlines and logistics the only feasible option was to shoot the car in the basement at HR Owen in Kensington. The shoot was scheduled for a weekday evening, after the showroom had closed. As expected the basement wasn't the ideal environment to shoot a car, space was tight and very low ceilings. Luckily however the Car Lift gave us a workable solution.

We reversed the car into the lift then rigged lights at the top of the lift shaft. The shaft itself was matt black which really helped us control the reflections in the bodywork. The finished image was a composite as we used various lighting set ups for the interior, windows, paintwork and shadows. In post production all the elements were combined together with the red background.

The second part of the project was to produce a series of high resolution images of engine bays

of various Ferrari's. These would then be made into a short film that would be shown at the exhibition. The idea was to pan and zoom across the still images, and combine this with arresting typography and sound. The finished piece was around 5 minutes long and included 12 cars (I've included a short edit below).

The cars ranged from a Testarossa from the 1980s, to the very latest Hybrid LaFerrari. As with the poster shoot the logistics where key. We arranged to shoot the cars in HR Owen service centre, in London where we set up a temporary studio in one corner of the workshop. The cars were then rolled in and out as needed. The cars were all prepared to a very high standard, with the

HR Owen staff doing a fantastic job in making everything run as smoothly as possible.